Requirements for Using NPIV

If you plan to enable NPIV on your virtual machines, you should be aware of certain requirements.

The following requirements exist:

• NPIV can be used only for virtual machines with RDM disks. Virtual machines with regular virtual disks use the WWNs of the host’s physical HBAs.
• HBAs on your host must support NPIV.

  For information, see the VMware Compatibility Guide and refer to your vendor documentation.

  • Use HBAs of the same type, either all QLogic or all Emulex. VMware does not support heterogeneous HBAs on the same host accessing the same LUNs.
  • If a host uses multiple physical HBAs as paths to the storage, zone all physical paths to the virtual machine. This is required to support multipathing even though only one path at a time will be active.
  • Make sure that physical HBAs on the host have access to all LUNs that are to be accessed by NPIV-enabled virtual machines running on that host.
• The switches in the fabric must be NPIV-aware.
• When configuring a LUN for NPIV access at the storage level, make sure that the NPIV LUN number and NPIV target ID match the physical LUN and Target ID.